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Content last reviewed on 2025-04-11
This is the direction page for the Import and Integrate group which is part of the Foundations stage of the DevOps lifecycle and is maintained by the group's Product Manager, Magdalena Frankiewicz (E-mail).
The Import and Integrate group plays a critical role in GitLab's FY26 strategy. Our primary focus is providing essential capabilities that enable customer migrations, both from external tools to GitLab and between GitLab instances. We're working to ensure that migrations between GitLab instances and from third-party platforms are seamless, reliable, and user-friendly.
As part of Monetization, Analytics and Foundations, we will closely partner with other teams to optimize the new customer journey, ensuring seamless onboarding through improved importer experiences.
Import and Integrate group is responsible for the following categories:
| Category | Direction | Description | Current focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Importers | Direction page | Migration of groups and projects from one GitLab instance to another, importing projects from other software development tools like GitHub or Bitbucket. | 70% |
| Integrations | Direction page | Intuitive collaboration with tools GitLab's customers rely on. | 5% |
| Webhooks | Direction page | Integration with custom applications that GitLab's customers rely on. | 5% |
| API | Direction page | GitLab's APIs and related tooling. | 0% |
The remaining 20% is spend to support Cells initiative and respond to incoming Request for Help issues.
For FY26, the Import and Integrate group is focusing on key initiatives that directly support GitLab's company objectives:
In addition to these initiatives, our engineering team is working on standardizing importers to improve consistency, security, and performance by creating reusable components.
While long-term plans include a new migration platform (Org Mover) dependent on the Portable Organization feature (likely 2-3 years away), Direct Transfer remains the critical bridge solution that must be properly maintained and improved. We're also focusing on making third-party importers more sustainable and enabling external contributions for new third-party importers, as these tools directly impact our ability to acquire new customers from competitors.
A notable gap in our current offerings is the lack of a proper backup and restore solution for GitLab.com. Currently, customers repurpose our export/import functionality for backups, though it was never designed for this use case. GitLab itself uses export/import functionality in case of incidents. This creates challenges for customers and significantly increases the operational load on our infrastructure teams. While addressing this need is vital, it is outside of the scope of our group. We are, however, looking into the actual usage of exports for backup purposes, and may consider restricting the number of allowed project exports in a period.
The following categories are in maintenance mode, with no active feature development planned for FY26:
Given our resource constraints, we have deprioritized:
We strongly encourage and welcome community contributions across all our categories, especially for those in maintenance mode. Recent releases have seen significant enhancements through community contributions in the Webhooks category, demonstrating the value of this collaborative approach.
For guidance on contributing, please refer to the specific direction pages for each category or reach out to the team directly.